cousin, Sir Gilbert Pickering, who sate as one of the
judges at the king's trial. Much of this early training lived in Dryden
to the last. He never freed himself from the Puritan sense of religion,
from the Puritan love for theological discussion and ecclesiastical
controversy. Two of his greatest poems, the "Religio Laici," and the
"Hind and Panther," are simply theological treatises in verse. Nor did
the Commonwealth's man ever die in him. "All good subjects," he could
say boldly in an hour of royal triumph, "abhor arbitrary power whether
in one or in many"; and no writer has embodied in more pregnant words
the highest claim of a people's right, that

"right supreme
To make their kings, for kings are made for them."

Dryden grew up too amidst the last echoes of the Elizabethan verse.
Jonson and Massinger, Webster and Shirley, were still living men in his
childhood. The lyrics of Herrick, the sweet fancies of George Herbert,
were fresh in men's ears as he grew to manhood. Even when he entered
into the new world of the Restoration some veterans of this nobler
school, like Denham and Waller, were still lingering on the stage. The
fulness and imaginative freedom of Elizabethan prose lived on till 1677
in Jeremy Taylor, while Clarendon preserved to yet later years the
grandeur and stateliness of its march. Above all Milton still sate
musing on the "Paradise Lost" in the tapestried chamber of his house in
Bunhill Fields.

[Sidenote: Dryden and the Critical Poets.]

Throughout his life something of the spirit of the age which he was the
last to touch lived on in Dryden. He loved and studied Chaucer and
Spenser even while he was copying Moliere and Corneille. His noblest
panegyric was pronounced over Shakspere. At the time when Rymer, the
accepted critic of the Restoration, declared "our poetry of the last age
as rude as our architecture," and sneered at "that Paradise Lost of
Milton's which some are pleased to call a poem," Dryden saw in it "one
of the greatest, most noble and sublime poems which either this age or
nation hath produced." But whether in mind or in life Dryden was as
unlike the Elizabethans as he was in his earlier years unlike the men of
the poetic school which followed him. Of that school, the critical
school as it has been called of English poetry, he was indeed the
founder. He is the first of our great poets in whom "fancy is but the
feather of the pen." Whether he